“I’ve always had a passion for the weather, ever since I was a little kid watching the monsoon thunderstorms with my dad,” explained photographer Mike Olbinski, whose striking photos of haboobs, an intense dust storm, in Arizona’s arid climate capture Mother Nature’s greatness.

“Dust storms are fairly amazing to me. The really good ones can create this ominous feeling when you see this wall of dirt approaching,” Olbinski said in an e-mail interview with Weather.com. “But what fascinated me more than the wall of dust are the way dust storms are formed.”

After seeing a few microbursts (a column of sinking air that produces strong winds) turn into full-on dust storms, he was fascinated by the process. This progression of the storm is what caused him to start documenting haboobs in the form of timelapse.

A wedding photographer by trade, Olbinski was hooked chasing storms after he decided to use his point-and-shoot camera to capture lightning. After two failed outings, he managed to snap an “amazing three-pronged strike” and was “hooked.” He now follows various storms in Arizona very closely.

“Since I chase storms, I'm usually out there a lot, so I stumble across these haboobs in areas I know they are most common. Even if I'm at home, I'll watch those early afternoon thunderstorms form down by Tucson or southeastern Arizona, and as they begin to roll northwest, I look for radar echoes or an approaching dust storm,” he explained. “But even then, I don't usually need to see it on radar. If a storm looks intense enough on radar, you're about 95 percent likely to get some kind of dust storm from it. That's about when I head out of the house and go on a chase.”

The collection above features several of the dust storms Olbinski has chased, including the famous dust storm that hit Phoenix on July 5, 2011. For more images and information, visit his website at MikeOlbinski.com.